In a recent CD post, I featured some claims that the SAT test is sexist and “rigged to favor boys,” even though the College Board’s Board of Trustees is headed by a woman, and has slightly more women (16 members) than men (15 members). Now there’s some new evidence that the SAT is also racially biased, and I guess therefore “rigged to favor whites,” even though the current Chair of the Board of Trustees of the CollegeBoard (which owns the SAT) is black and Lester Monts, the past chairman, is black.

And this part of the new research seems especially confusing:

There’s a concept on test-taking research known as “differential item functioning” (DIF). A DIF question is one on which students “matched by proficiency” and other factors, have variable scores predictably by race, on selected questions. On some of the easier verbal SAT questions, two studies find that the DIF favored white students, but on some of the most difficult verbal questions, the DIF favored black students. The white advantage is larger such that the studies suggest scores for black students are being held down by the way the test is scored, and that a shift to favor the more difficult questions would benefit black test-takers.